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Barbara Lindsey

10 Rules of Teaching in this Century -- Campus Technology - 0 views

  • the knowledge developed during the course does not pre-exist the course. Second, since the knowledge of the course does not exist before the course (because you and the students develop the knowledge during the course), your chief challenge is to manage the process of knowledge discovery.
  • Now, because learning resources and opportunities are infinite, make the move: Don’t just tell students the key knowledge in your field, but help them discover it through problem-based active learning. Change your curriculum from a list of what you will say to a list of essential problems (or questions) that students will address, with your guidance, throughout the semester.
  • It may well be better to re-state learning outcomes in terms of essential problems and the research associated with those essential problems, and build rubrics based on the problems within a problem-based learning structure.
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  • Move most assessment activity away from testing and toward evaluation of student evidence of learning.
  • In the new paradigm of active and varied learning, testing is less appropriate but assessing student evidence is more appropriate.
  • You, as a faculty member, must be as adept as your students in using Web-based applications, and there is no better way to learn the new breed of applications than to use them yourself for important professional purposes.
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    Talks about how we now can really walk the walk and have a learner-centered environment and the technologies nec. to support that.
Barbara Lindsey

News: The Evidence on Online Education - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took "blended" courses -- those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction -- appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment.
  • While the new study provides a strong endorsement of online learning, it also notes findings about the relative success (or lack thereof) of various teaching techniques used in online courses. The use of video or online quizzes -- frequently encouraged for online education -- "does not appear to enhance learning," the report says.
  • But noting the caveats in the report about factors other than medium of instruction, he said that "we should not take the report as saying it is simply better to move to online learning. These results demonstrate why more research is needed -- broadly based research that moves well beyond case studies conducted by distance education practitioners, research focused on student retention in online environments and especially research that looks behind the instructional medium to isolate the characteristics of instruction that produce positive results. Successful education has always been about engaging students whether it is in an online environment, face to face or in a blended setting. And fundamental to that is having faculty who are fully supported and engaged in that process as well."
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  • "Despite what appears to be strong support for online learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium," the report says. "In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages. At the same time, one should note that online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction."
  • Using technology to give students "control of their interactions" has a positive effect on student learning, however. "Studies indicate that manipulations that trigger learner activity or learner reflection and self-monitoring of understanding are effective when students pursue online learning as individuals," the report says.Notably, the report attributes much of the success in learning online (blended or entirely) not to technology but to time. "Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning," the report says.
Barbara Lindsey

Cell Phones in the (Language) Classroom: Recasting the Debate (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | ED... - 0 views

  • My Google Voice number has served primarily as a messaging service students call (sometimes spontaneously during the instructional period, more often outside of the classroom) to record dialogues, poetry, even song, either individually or in pairs. These recordings are stored on Google servers, but can be downloaded and posted on course management pages (Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai, etc.) or podcasting, blogging, or social networking sites (I post particularly good recordings on my Spanish Facebook page). While I have yet to experiment with this particular feature, Google Voice can also be used for conference calling, and dialogues with groups of students can be recorded for later informal group or formal teacher evaluation.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Do you see any issues with posting recordings on Facebook?
  • It is generally accepted that students work harder and become more engaged and invested in activities and assignments that might be publicly posted (on the Internet or otherwise). My own experience shows that students required to record speech of any kind in a computer laboratory setting spend considerable time preparing prior to recording. The very act of recording their voices — creating a permanent record of their speech — instilled a strong desire to perform well. In short, the act of recording increased students’ investment and engagement in the learning process.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Do you find this to be true for your students as well? How about for you?
  • The access that I had to that student combined with the ease and speed of communication presented by Google Voice solved more than a pronunciation problem; it likely helped me head off a building class management issue by engaging that student on his terms outside of the classroom setting.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Your thoughts?
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  • “I have a student who hasn’t done any homework this quarter, and out of the blue he sent me a goofy text message to my Google Voice number — completely unrelated to Spanish — something like “I hate this rain”— and, being the nerdy teacher, I texted him immediately back in Spanish: “No me gusta la lluvia tampoco.” One day later, he walks in for the first time with his homework and makes a big production about turning it in. I can’t help but feel that the personal connection of texting helped him remember — and actually want to do — the work for my class.”
  • While not all students will text back when I supply SMS feedback, those that do, like this one, tend to be looking for specifics and positive reinforcement. How is this additional engagement and interaction bad?
Barbara Lindsey

We can't let educators off the hook | Dangerously Irrelevant - 0 views

  • Successful technology integration only produces amplified results when in its integration agency is given to the learner, when it becomes a tool to help learners learn, not teachers teach.
  • I would also like to add that that old belief about teaching and learning has been around for a very long time now and part of that belief, the part about the teacher possessing the knowledge and imparting it to kids, is in direct threat when faced with technology. A teacher who has been taught to believe that they are needed for the knowledge they have and that that knowledge gives them authority in the classroom is threatened by technology. That threat needs to be approached lightly. If one speaks the truth too harshly the faithful will simply label them a blasphemer and ignore the truth in their message.
  • et me start by saying that I consider teaching among the most important professions on earth, but just as doctors need to be current on medical technology, teachers MUST be current on information and communication technologies. Those are the tools of the trade.
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  • but why don’t teachers understand this? To figure this out we need to understand this philosophically and historically. Doctors, in the mid-19th Century resisted technologies as most teachers do now. Lister and Pasteur were “so far ahead of the curve they weren’t on the same road” when they suggested sterilization. Doctors of the time, seeing themselves as “healers” could not comprehend that they were killing half of their patients by resisting the technologies of the time – the belief system inherent in the identity model of the profession actually prevented them from being what they perceived themselves to be.
  • Part of this is because we teach neither history nor philosophy. We do not share with teachers why Socrates opposed literacy, or what Gutenberg destroyed. We do not allow them to understand the essential humanness of technology, or to understand technology in Heidegger’s terms – the art of manipulating the world for our benefit.
  • Now I don’t know what Glogster is, but I do know that every technology gives and takes. The book disabled hundreds of millions and wiped out hundreds of languages. It also spread learning and allowed both the novel and eventually journalism to appear. And I know that our students must have the philosophical grounding in what technology is, how to learn it, and how to use it, that so many of our current teachers lack. After all, the classroom is filled with technology – chairs and desks (1835 via William Alcott), chalkboards (1840 via William Alcott), Time schedules (1845 via Henry Barnard), Books (1840s, mostly Henry Barnard), testing (1910, the Carnegie Commission), even ballpoint pens – that highly controversial 1950s invention of Marcel Bich. And all of those technologies have benefits and real limits.
  • I’m not really focused on, nor do I think Scott is focused on, “administrative technologies” but on “educational technologies.” A gradebook – I might argue, is no more an “educational technology” than a file cabinet is.
  • What I think we are discussing is transformational technologies. Technologies whereuse alters the learning process.
  • I need to say two things: First, and I think this is a big part of Scott’s target here, every school administrator, every policy maker, and every tech director making “blocking decisions,” needs to wake up and take responsibility for keeping our current century away from education.
  • But – in the end – a big part of this remains “taking responsibility for your own learning.” The first free seminars in these systems which I offered were presented in 1998, and at that point there was already a massive research base for what Scott is saying here. The laws regarding technology access in terms of students with disabilities (and those with “504″ plans) were placed on the books in 1995. IBM was promoting speech recognition and text-to-speech in 1996, and Lynne Anderson-Inman was already proving the value of “digital texts” and “digital notebooks” and digitally linked note-taking in the mid-1990s.
  • Jerrid, Troy, and everyone… The issue is this - In order to be lifelong learners it is essential to understand and know how to function with the information and communications technologies of our world, and to know how to adapt when those technologies change. In order to be human successes we also must understand how to communicate what we know, how to collaborate, and how to distribute information. This is why Socrates drilled his students on memory. In pre-literate Greece, that was the essential tool. This is why we taught “reading” (meaning decoding ink-on-paper alphabetic texts) in school, and why we taught writing with pens and pencils, and why we introduced students to libraries. In the Gutenberg era these were the essential tools.
  • But, when kids are writing, I want them to (among other things) be able to communicate with Grandma even if Grandma lives thousands of miles away, even if Grandma is blind, even if Grandma speaks another language. And if they are reading, I don’t want them limited to the 2,000 “age appropriate” books and 1975 World Book Encyclopedia in the local public library.
  • Newspaper readership, yes a minority, but a rapidly changing environment http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1133/decline-print-newspapers-increased-online-news with (in 2009) only 25% of Americans getting news from print daily.
  • The change is occurring across the “print world” – Amazon, 19 July 2010: “Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.
  • The lack of real history of education courses is what leaves so many teachers completely unaware of why schools do what they do, and leaves them confused about what the tools of education are.
  • Every day that I present for educators, I have a greater appreciate for how distorted the view is as seen through the eyes of a typical EduBlogger. In fact, the majority of the voices in the EdTech Community are so far ahead of the curve that it doesn’t even seem like their on the same road anymore. Most educators have never listened to a podcast, much less created one. They’ve never edited a wiki, much less started one of their own. So how on earth could they be expected to have a rational conversation about the impact new technologies are having on the skill sets our students need? Simply put, they can’t. The majority of the voices many of us listen to on a regular basis… actually represent just a tiny fraction of the educators out there. We’re the minority, the outsiders, the ones who talk using strange terms involving words with far too many missing vowels.
  • You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.
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    Successful technology integration only produces amplified results when in its integration agency is given to the learner, when it becomes a tool to help learners learn, not teachers teach.
Barbara Lindsey

gladwell dot com - designs for working - 0 views

  • The task of the office, then, is to invite a particular kind of social interaction--the casual, nonthreatening encounter that makes it easy for relative strangers to talk to each other. Offices need the sort of social milieu that Jane Jacobs found on the sidewalks of the West Village. "It is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships," Jacobs wrote. If you substitute "office" for "city street neighborhood," that sentence becomes the perfect statement of what the modern employer wants from the workplace.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      This reminds me of the strength of weak ties argument.
  • In the war-room study, the company moved the client, the programmers, and a manager into a dedicated conference room, and made them stay there until the project was done. Using the war room cut the software-development time by two-thirds, in part because there was far less time wasted on formal meetings or calls outside the building: the people who ought to have been bumping into each other were now sitting next to each other.
  • The agency is in a huge old warehouse, three stories high and the size of three football fields. It is informally known as Advertising City, and that's what it is: a kind of artfully constructed urban neighborhood. The floor is bisected by a central corridor called Main Street, and in the center of the room is an open space, with café tables and a stand of ficus trees, called Central Park. There's a basketball court, a game room, and a bar. Most of the employees are in snug workstations known as nests, and the nests are grouped together in neighborhoods that radiate from Main Street like Paris arrondissements. The top executives are situated in the middle of the room. The desk belonging to the chairman and creative director of the company looks out on Central Park. The offices of the chief financial officer and the media director abut the basketball court. Sprinkled throughout the building are meeting rooms and project areas and plenty of nooks where employees can closet themselves when they need to.
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  • A vital community, in Jacobs's view, required more than the appropriate physical environment. It also required a certain kind of person, who could bind together the varied elements of street life.
  • What Stephenson's X-rays do best, though, is tell you who the public characters are. In every network, there are always one or two people who have connections to many more people than anyone else. Stephenson calls them "hubs," and on her charts lines radiate out from them like spokes on a wheel. (Bernie the candy-store owner, on Jacobs's Hudson Street, was a hub.) A few people are also what Stephenson calls "gatekeepers": they control access to critical people, and link together a strategic few disparate groups. Finally, if you analyze the graphs there are always people who seem to have lots of indirect links to other people--who are part of all sorts of networks without necessarily being in the center of them. Stephenson calls those people "pulsetakers." (In Silicon Valleyspeak, the person in a sea of cubicles who pops his or her head up over the partition every time something interesting is going on is called a prairie dog: prairie dogs are pulsetakers.)
  • she pointed to the lines connecting that department with other departments. "They're all coming into this one place," she said, and she showed how all the lines coming out of marketing converged on one senior executive. "There's very little path redundancy. In human systems, you need redundancy, you need communication across multiple paths."
  • What concerned Stephenson wasn't just the lack of redundancy but the fact that, in her lingo, many of the paths were "unconfirmed": they went only one way.
  • What you want to do is put people who don't trust each other near each other. Not necessarily next to each other, because they get too close. But close enough so that when you pop your head up, you get to see people, they are in your path, and all of a sudden you build an inviting space where they can hang out, kitchens and things like that. Maybe they need to take a hub in an innovation network and place the person with a pulsetaker in an expert network--to get that knowledge indirectly communicated to a lot of people."
  • it's clear that there are some very simple principles from the study of public characters which ought to drive the design process. "You want to place hubs at the center," Joyce Bromberg, the director of space planning, says. "These are the ones other people go to in order to get information. Give them an environment that allows access. But there are also going to be times that they need to have control--so give them a place where they can get away. Gatekeepers represent the fit between groups. They transmit ideas. They are brokers, so you might want to put them at the perimeter, and give them front porches"--areas adjoining the workspace where you might put little tables and chairs. "Maybe they could have swinging doors with white boards, to better transmit information. As for pulsetakers, they are the roamers. Rather than give them one fixed work location, you might give them a series of touchdown spots--where you want them to stop and talk. You want to enable their meandering."
  • The point of the new offices is to compel us to behave and socialize in ways that we otherwise would not--to overcome our initial inclination to be office suburbanites. But, in all the studies of the new workplaces, the reservations that employees have about a more social environment tend to diminish once they try it. Human behavior, after all, is shaped by context, but how it is shaped--and whether we'll be happy with the result--we can understand only with experience.
Barbara Lindsey

Information overload, the early years - The Boston Globe - 0 views

  • In many ways, our key methods of coping with overload haven’t changed since the 16th century: We still need to select, summarize, and sort, and ultimately need human judgment and attention to guide the process.
  • Early modern compilers were driven by this enthusiasm, even beyond their hopes for acquiring reputation or financial gain. Today, we see the same impulse in the proliferation of cooperative information sharing on the Internet, such as the many designers and programmers sharing new ways to visualize and efficiently use huge quantities of data. In democratizing our ability to contribute to a universal encyclopedia of experience and information, the Internet has shown just how widespread that long-running ambition remains today.
  • Overload has long been fueled by our own enthusiasm — the enthusiasm for accumulating and sharing knowledge and information, and also for experimenting with new forms of organizing and presenting it.
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    Final page of article
Barbara Lindsey

American Express - Hong Kong - Personal Information Collection Statement - 0 views

  • When you give us information about you we are collecting it in order to review your application for products and services this applies to both existing and potentially new customers. We will use information for operation of your account, provision of products and services and for marketing purposes. Please note that if you do not provide the information required in the mandatory fields we may be unable to process your request. Security
  • In all other cases we will not disclose customer information unless we have previously informed the customer, have been authorized by the customer, or are required to do so by law or other regulatory authority. In particular, when a court order or subpoena requires us to disclose information, we notify the customer promptly to provide an opportunity to exercise his or her legal rights. The only exceptions to this policy are when court order or law prohibits us from notifying the customer, or in cases in which fraud and/or criminal activity is suspected. Further, we will not use medical information for marketing purposes or to provide credit.
  • Please do keep in mind that if you take advantage of an offer from an American Express business partner and become their customer, they may independently wish to send offers to you. In this case, you will need to inform them separately if you do not wish to receive future offers from them.
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  • We do share information about you within the American Express Group of Companies so we can provide you with products and services and bring you information about other American Express products and services. All American Express Companies comply with The American Express Privacy Principles.  
Barbara Lindsey

Mobile Learning Environments (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • There are now more than 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)'s February 2010 press release. This means that mobile has taken the place of FM radio as the most ubiquitous communications technology on the planet.1
  • Mobile Phone Network model Centralized Peer-to-peer Content customization Uniform Personalized to context Information distribution Just-in-case Just-in-time Role of audience Consumer Equal p
  • articipant Reliability qualifier Authority Social capital Governance Institutional Relational
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  • I've seen that the introduction of new technology can provide a reason to rethink a course from the ground up and reassess its core educational goals. Often the greatest educational benefits seem to come from this process, not just the technology that encouraged it.
  • It might be safe to say that each time a new medium appears, no matter how different it is from the last, the normal reaction of first adopters is to use it as a new package for existing content.
  • I've seen that the introduction of new technology can provide a reason to rethink a course from the ground up and reassess its core educational goals.
  • It can be easy to forget that we human beings are more than brains connected to an apparatus that moves us around in space. Instead, we belong to communities, we live in neighborhoods, we have local culture and events. Inquiry into these real things led to many of the fields we now call science, literature, mathematics, and history. Why then do we isolate instruction in those fields to a classroom, instead of deriving instruction from the environment from which these subjects originated?
  • place-based learning.2 One such example, Dow Day, is a mobile documentary that relives the student protests of 1967 in Madison, Wisconsin, against the Dow Chemical Company. In this activity, location-aware handheld devices add an augmented layer of history to a walk through the campus, placing the student in the role of a news reporter. By monitoring the device's GPS, Dow Day creates the illusion of additional characters standing in physical space and facilitates simulated conversations with these historical entities. In addition, when players walk to predefined media locations, they trigger video footage showing the physical scene from 40 years ago, effectively superimposing the marchers and police onto the current landscape (see Figure 2).
  • Situated theories of cognition claim that knowing and doing are inherently linked.4
  • One such example is a mobile game called Mentira, produced at the University of New Mexico. The game is designed to teach an introductory college Spanish course in ways that are contextually sound for language learning. In the first unit, students play a mystery game on handheld devices in class, taking on a role and a goal within a story told completely in Spanish. In the second part, the class moves outside to a local Spanish-speaking neighborhood where they continue the story while interacting with physical and virtual Spanish speakers in real places (see Figure 3).
  • With Mentira, students learn Spanish outside the classroom through narrative and interaction with members of a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, re-situating language in practice.
  • Identifying the disconnect, a small team from the Animal Science and the Academic Technology departments at UW–Madison are working on a prototype for hobbyist birdwatchers. WeBIRD aims to crowdsource ornithology research by providing a tool for hobbyist practitioners. A birder will record the audio of a bird heard out in the field and have the system identify the species while logging the sighting's location, current weather, time of day, and date to a central database. This data can then be used for anything from formal research of migration patterns over time to individual questions such as, "Where am I most likely to see a cardinal this time of year?" The potential for location-aware, casual gaming structures such as birder achievement badges and leader boards are also being investigated in order to provide additional social play motives for participation.
  • Learning happens anywhere someone has questions and the means to explore answers. As ubiquitous access to information continues to shift toward personal mobile devices, more and more of the learning that takes place may be happening outside of the classroom and in the context of a backyard conversation, a walk through campus, or a Taquería in New Mexico.
Barbara Lindsey

A Difference: Flickring Mind Maps ... making learning sticky - 0 views

  • If the school division didn't have a filter this project could have started more safely.
  • I expect a lot of deep learning to come out of this. This assignment is being marked for completion only; if it's done they get 100%, if not they get 0%
  • I characterize this as assessment for learning.
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  • there must be a minimum of 5 public pictures in the account in order to start this review process.
  • If they are real pictures, the public photos in the account are added to the pool of pictures in flickr searches and RSS feeds.
  • In the course of looking for the pictures and creating the annotated hot spots they will be thinking about the material covered in a new way and strengthening the mental links to the concepts they have learned. I hope to make their learning sticky.
  • reating digital mind maps of the material we learned way back at the beginning of the semester.
  • At exam time they can review all the annotated pictures in the pool made by themselves and their classmates. They will be teaching and learning from each other.
  • They can use the pictures in projects, assignments and blog posts. I will also be able to use them the next time I teach the course to benefit the next group of students. They will be teaching people they have never met. They are also building a permanent resource collection.
  • They are talking to other students and teachers in the building about this. A buzz is growing. Can you imagine the conversations they are having at home? They are involving their families and friends in their learning.
  • As pictures began to come up in public searches on flickr for each of the unique course tags, I created a flickr badge (you'll have to "sign in" to follow that link) for each class. I put it in each blog's sidebar under the heading "Our Math Photo Gallery." The engine behind the badges is the RSS feed associated with each unique course tag. Flickr generates these RSS feeds automatically.
Barbara Lindsey

Fishing / Fish Nuggets » CogDogBlog - 0 views

  • Course Management Systems are huge fish nugget factories. And we spend a lot of time, effort, money keeping the assembly lines moving. Fishing? Most things web 2.0.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How can we swim against the stream when university administration pays millions in initial and on-going costs (renewal fees, support staff, 'training sessions') for these lock-step CMSs and actively promote their use and discourage or prevent the use of flexible, interactive and user-defined social networking environments?
  • Most of the faculty that reach out to me are really just asking for tech support. They want to know how to perform certain tasks in Blackboard. They want to know how to edit a web site. They don’t tend to ask the bigger questions: what is appropriate technology for me to use to achieve my goals, how should I use x to help my students learn.
  • I had tremendous latitude to explore and try new technologies
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  • Do we foster an environment of “learned helplessness” among the faculty we support by most of our work being workshops on the tools rather than the craft?
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Why is it that so many educators don't get this?
  • And along these lines, I was part of some technology conversations with UBC faculty and I just relished watching my colleague Brian’s face contort when someone says, “how do I use twitter in my class?” He’d say in his sweet flip matter, “I am not going to answer that” — not because he doesn’t want to help, but because he wants to teach fishing, not toss them nuggets. You don’t find a freaking “job aid” that gives you a 8 step recipe to use twitter in your economics class– you spend some time in the environment, and let the affordances linger with your content area, and then maybe, you develop an idea that makes sense.
  • My thought is you do a lot of small things.
  • Toss ‘em something that might help on a personal level- be it flickr or doodle or diigo or heck, Blabberize.
  • it means less formal training, less workshops, and more learning by doing. It means using these tools a much as possible in our processes, so they become part of a fabric, not something strange and exotic.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Yes--again, why is this such a difficult concept for educators?
  • They get so hung up on the basic that they can’t get into the cool stuff like expanding and applying their knowledge to more challenging problems. The same situation occurs with faculty. There are lots of folks out there…really…who don’t understand the Internet or servers or how web pages or email works or what the difference. For many folks, uploading links and icons and documents to Blackboard is a major accomplishment given their complete and total lack of understanding of the technological world. I am not even talking about understanding at the level of a techie but more an intuitive sense of how and why things work the way they do with technology.
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Barbara Lindsey

Second Life: Do You Need One? (Part 4) : July 2007 : THE Journal - 0 views

    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      This is a fascinating insight that should be investigated further.
  • Digital learners then typically end up in extremely diverse networks, further expanding their cultural experience in the digital world.  Digital learners are also constantly faced with challenges to their established real world social norms and ask some very tough questions about those real world dividers.  Many traditional visitors remain in those topic-centered social groups, which typically consist of people of common interest and backgrounds, providing them less immersion into the diversity of the digital environment.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      This is a fascinating insight that should be investigated further.
  • Most traditional educator-visitors soon ask how they can find the space inworld to create a "classroom."  The result is typically a walled building, with ceilings, desks and chairs, and a lectern at the front next to a PowerPoint screen.  Digital visitors may also request space for a "classroom," but it is more likely to end up being a platform floating in the sky, with clouds instead of chairs, and digital media streamed onto the side of a giant bubble floating in the middle of the space.
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  • this point represents a key distinction between the traditional and digital person.  While the traditional educator approaches the virtual world to learn how it can be used in education, the digital educator approaches the environment asking how this experience can change the entire practice of teaching and learning.  One seeks to perhaps adapt their current practices to fit a new environment, while the other looks to completely transform what they do based upon the opportunity provided in the virtual world.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Key distinction in most technology-enhanced learning environments.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      key distinction in much adaptation/adoption of technology-enhanced learning environments.
  • traditional educators seek a structure to their inworld activities, while digital learners self define a process to reach the outcome they have decided upon. 
  • digital gamers are familiar with self-investigation to determine what is needed to "win the mission" and seek only resources and support.
Barbara Lindsey

Lead article: How did a couple of veteran classroom teachers end up in a space like thi... - 0 views

  • With social networking and media-sharing practices rapidly assuming a central role in our professional and personal lives, teachers have a responsibility to bring these practices into the classroom.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Why responsibility? Even if it doesn't serve a pedagogical purpose? Advance the learning that is supposed to take place?
  • technology uber-fans gush over their embrace of every new gadget, technology and practice, affixing computer-driven activities onto factory-model teaching practices as shiny appendages, resulting in a ‘technology façade’
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Well, I would have a problem making a direct connection between über-fans and factory-model teaching proponents. I would like to think the über-fans lean more towards constructivist practices.
  • This does not mean that traditional literacies of critical reading, thinking and communication must make way for emerging literacies of collaboration, online communication and multimedia navigation. It does mean that we have to transform our teaching to accommodate them all effectively.
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  • a tension between their passions and interests and the Academy’s curricular obligations. When woven into the fabric of the classroom, blogs allow the participants to articulate their feelings as a way of addressing these tensions. As well, blogs provide a space where the participants’ interests and passions can bubble forth for the enrichment of the group.
  • By blogging effectively within classroom settings, we can mentor learner forays into public spaces.
  • We wish to emphasise the importance of distinguishing between using blogs as holders of factory-model teaching practices, and taking advantage of their connectivity and transparency to deepen and liberate learning from the confines of stagnant, teacher-centric models. Ignoring the transformative capabilities of connectivity, some teachers using blogs merely reproduce offline practices online. Limiting classroom blogging to one-way transactions of information and directives from teacher to learners may add convenience and efficiency to the classroom, but does nothing for learning itself. Nor does assigning and directing wooden, forced, framed discussions online, which result in little more than mind-numbing ‘busy work’. We belittle and infantalise our students, further rewarding docility and disengagement if we over-direct posts by giving minute instructions as to their content, number and direction.
  • classroom blogging,
  • focusing on emerging pedagogy rather than tools
  • We will examine hyperlinked slow-blogging as reflective learning; multimedia, interactive blogging as action-based learning; and connected, transparent blogging as social learning.
  • Reflection-through-writing is a powerful aid to information retention, which is poor unless the lesson is repeated in a variety of contexts
  • The learner, in the act of writing down what s/he has learned, solidifies understanding and reveals areas of confusion.
  • Traditionally this kind of reflective narrative, found in journals and portfolios, has helped learners gain skill at meta-discourse and take responsibility for learning in liberal arts contexts. Teachers follow progress and detect comprehension gaps while coming to know learners’ styles, contexts and preferences. Learner-teacher interactions through reflective writing can deepen important bonds, an important indicator of effective learning (Raider Roth 2005).
  • different kinds of learning contexts including vocational by inviting learners to contextualise the learning in their own way within personal experience, thereby making the learning their own (
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      An aspect of constructivist teaching and learning.
  • But if limited to the kinds of practices achieved offline, while efficient and convenient, and affording keyboarding practice, this use ignores new literacies of connectivity, collaboration, communication and multimedia expression. It also leaves out learners for whom written reflection is not always optimal or possible.
  • Although a blog organises itself, ordinarily and on first view, in reverse chronological order, the latest post being most prominent, tagging and hyperlinking allow for more associative, lateral ways of organising and connecting thoughts. Even the novice learner can transcend the limits of time and linearity in linking nascent ideas, discoveries and meta-discourse on the learning, replacing ‘…the essentially linear, fixed methods that had produced the triumphs of capitalism and industrialism with what are essentially poetic machines that capture and create the anarchic brilliance of human imagination’
  • Learners can link to practices other than written as they struggle to articulate and thus retain and apply what they have learned. For example, some learners will naturally link to audio rather than to text files of their reflections; others will link to images they have taken that are reflective of the learning process and outcomes.
  • thereby extending the reflective practice into synthesis and analysis and invention
  • If we know we are being read, that our explorations have value out in the world, we tend to take more care with our expression and our thinking as communiqués to the Other as well as to the self.
  • From learner posts, the teacher can point to models and questions, to moments of creative and critical success. Learning deepens, writing strengthens: these successes in turn pull the writer back to the blog again and again, to reflect and to improve thinking and expression skills.
  • That these messages to the self (and by extension, to the class and the world) are archived by date and category (or tag) allows them to take their place in an ongoing narrative of the learning.
  • Linking out connects us to more than ourselves. So, in this time of crumbling communities and the cult of the individual, our learners can, through active hyperlinking within a reflective learning practice, become more self-aware rather than more self-absorbed.
  • In selecting media, learners gain critical awareness of the grammar of image and sound as well as language. They learn to evaluate the impact of visual media on their discipline, on their society and on their lives as they develop skill at understanding structure, the arc of an argument, the use of transitions.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      But don't learners need structured guidance in order to be able to do this successfully?
  • Hendrik and Ornberg have asserted, that ‘…audio is more effective than text for creating a sense of co-presence’
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Reactions to this statement?
  • Students learn the discipline by doing the discipline
  • Evie’s work on the web, and in turn catapulted one of our learners into the role of activist and advocate for a cause about which she cared deeply.
  • By the end of the semester, Evie was not only a committed and involved activist for women’s rights, but a published photographer.
  • And so, the apprentice became the master, the student became the teacher, and Sean’s blog is fulfilling by becoming a valued resource for a teacher in Argentina and for her students as well.
  • Her blogging world and her real world became forever ‘intertwingled’ when she started leaving comments on the blogs of some of the graffiti artists she was following, and they, in turn, left comments on her blog. What followed was a flurry of comments, Instant Messaging (IM) conversations, Skype (r) chats and blogposts each taking Claire ever closer to the very people she has studied and admired and analysed…from afar. After the class ended (and after Claire graduated) Claire’s interest in graffiti continued.
  • But just as in the case of Sean, Claire went from being the observer to participant and now to a creator of graffiti, thanks in part to the connections made via social software tools.
  • it is not difficult to see how a tool such as a blog can keep learners immersed in course content in a way that traditional, teacher and textbook-centric teaching simply cannot.
  • A third, and perhaps most significant, role for classroom blogs to play, then, is in social learning, in the forming of close bonds within the learning community itself and with the outside world. Blogs afford learners a strong sense of belonging to a dynamic learning collaborative, following the apprenticeship model of learning, in which everyone is expert and apprentice to one another
  • The job of the teacher using social software is to create an understanding in and amongst the participants that they need to work together as a social entity, as a collaborative group, that is linked to and communicating among themselves as well as with the world.
  • Student bloggers learn by collaborating with one another through online group projects and through discussions, both formal and informal, that spring up on a central course blog, what we call the ‘Motherblog’, and by linking to one another within their own blogs, and creating feedback loops through the commenting function. Students also learn from one another through the blog archives, which grow year by year. Although we still teach in a departmentalised, semesterised system, the archiving subverts the notion of isolated learning segments by carrying the blog’s accumulated wisdom from group to group, informing the new learners’ experiences by adding context, models and inspiration
  • And unlike a discussion board that might be hosted on a course management tool such as Blackboard, these multimedia posts and comments are archived, hyperlinked and are open and available to all and not just the class.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Critical difference.
  • Learners and teachers bring into the community discussion their own expertise, prior learning, cultural perspectives. They can converse here about what interests them about what they are studying. This kind of informal discussion weaves the threads of collective intelligence, and it helps learners to think beyond the strict confines of the syllabus, seeing connections to themselves and the world.
  • The class uses Flickr to collect and share images to be used in image-only essays and reflections, and in multimedia texts.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How interesting.
  • As Garrison and Anderson (2003) point out, ‘…a community of learners is an essential, core element of an educational experience when higher-order learning is the desired outcome’ (2003:22)
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      A good rationale for collaborative engagement.
  • Using blogs as a complement to the face-to-face classroom environment not only provides more time on task for the learners, but if left open to world (as opposed to behind a firewall or a password or contained within the shell of a Learning Management System) these tools allow the real world - those crucial informal learning networks - into our classrooms…and the remarkable connections that happen as a result.
  • We can invite the outside world into the course intentionally, by asking experts in our field to participate in time-limited blog-based discussions with our learners. In these ‘blogging invitationals’ our learners can interact with professionals, joining the conversation of the real-world discipline in a meaningful way.
  • Other powerful connections with the world outside the classroom can occur through inter-classroom or inter-school blogging exchanges, or in service-learning initiatives, in which university learners, for example, mentor younger learners via connected blogging and feedback through comments, classroom to classroom, as writing buddies.
Barbara Lindsey

The Tempered Radical: Rework, Retrain, Rethink... - 0 views

  • Would we experience an educational revolution where children learned to create their own knowledge and make connections between classmates across continents?
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Exactly what Barbara Ganley envisioned for Middlebury, which said, thanks, but no thanks.
  • Would new discoveries be made by curious kids who were "unleashed" for the first time, free to explore? Or would classrooms remain teacher-paced and highly directed, with students exploring the same site on the same day at the same time as their peers?  Would we end up with far more Power Point presentations than any one child should ever produce?  Would computer use remain limited--as it so often is--to word processing and basic research?
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Well, everyone? What do our classrooms look like?
Barbara Lindsey

Web 2.0: beyond the buzz words | 4 Jun 2007 | ComputerWeekly.com - 0 views

  • Lee Bryant, one of the founders of Headshift, says the network effect is the difference. Traditional applications, such as groupware, became slower the more people used them, he says. With Web 2.0 applications the reverse is true: the more people use them, the more effective they become.
  • “You influence each other, so that if you use a social tagging system, for example, themes start to emerge and other people pick up on them and you get these positive feedback loops. It is that difference that leads to the network effect.”
  • These technologies are mostly just HTML and Javascript web pages designed to offer a more streamlined user experience, sitting atop a relational data layer used to feed back user-contributed data in new ways.
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  • “We suddenly have enough bandwidth, memory and computing power around these net-centric platforms,” he says. This means that the “people-to-people” concept that Web 1.0 wanted to accomplish can be supported, but with software interfaces that make it easier to contribute.
  • Seely Brown’s project-by-project approach is well-advised. “Start by putting together a decent collection of RSS feeds relevant to your project,” says Bryant. Then, enabling the posting and sharing of bookmarks will help glean knowledge from the project team. Complementing this with blogs will enable people to spend more time on those elements from the bookmarks and feeds that are particularly relevant and need further articulation.
  • Understanding the difference between consuming newsfeeds and consuming e-mail demonstrates a wider cultural shift that needs to take place in Web 2.0-savvy organisations. Generally, e-mails demand focused attention. They are processed in sequence and each takes a couple of minutes (or more) from your day. Handling newsfeeds and blog posts in that way would make you unproductive, says Bryant. They require a “river of news” approach, in which workers skim large amounts of information for helpful nuggets. Social tagging helps to naturally elevate certain topics above others by making them more popular.Finally, a wiki will help escalate blog discussion to more collaborative working, as needed. This has certainly been Ward’s experience: “The way the sites tend to work is that the blog is where people have a dialogue, but if it moves into more detailed work, it moves into the wiki,” she says.
Barbara Lindsey

Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations | Resources | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

  • W here students had once called a large number of their classes "death by lecture," she noted they were now calling them "death by PowerPoint." >
  • here students had once called a large number of their classes "death by lecture," she noted they were now calling them "death by PowerPoint."
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Not representative sample
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  • With such specific applications of technology and the limited use of other forms (for example, multimedia), students' low expectations for the use of technology in the curriculum is not surprising. Such constrained use of technology by the faculty in the curriculum and low student expectations may serve to limit innovation and creativity as well as the faculty's capacity to engage students more deeply in their subject matter. Like all organizations, colleges and universities respond to the demands placed upon them. Students' and institutions' low expectations for the use of technology for learning provide insufficient impetus for faculties to change their behavior and make broader, more innovative use of these tools in the service of learning.
  • Consider this scenario:
  • From the beginning, however, a problem arose in that those middle school students went on to high schools and later to colleges that did not (and do not) provide this type of rich learning experience—a learning experience that can best be achieved when technology is used in the service of learning.
  • Data obtained from these sessions with high school and college seniors in Indiana, Oregon, and Virginia
  • Less attention has been given to how to help students achieve the desired learning outcomes through technology.
  • comparatively little support has been devoted to helping faculty use computers and other technologies in creative and innovative ways to deepen student learning.
  • To develop intentional learners, the curriculum must go beyond helping students gain knowledge for knowledge's sake to engaging students in the construction of knowledge for the sake of addressing the challenges faced by a complex, global society.
  • institutional structures and practices to resolve technical problems that faculty invariably encounter are very limited or are not the type of aid needed. Such lack of support limits the amount of time faculty can spend on what they do best—building a compelling curriculum and integrating technology for more powerful learning.
  • integrating study abroad into courses back on the home campus;
  • Faculty concerns perhaps center less on being "replaceable" and more on worrying that the teaching and learning enterprise will be reduced to students gathering information that can be easily downloaded, causing them to rely too heavily on technology instead of intellect.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Mentioned frequently by our group members.
  • First, traditional age students overwhelmingly prefer face-to-face contact with faculty to mediated communication. Second, technology used in the service of learning will require more—not less—sophistication on the part of students as they engage in processes of integration, translation, audience analysis, and critical judgment.
  • Faculty with expertise in one or more subjects, who have been exposed to what we know about how people learn, can determine how to enhance this learning through the use of technology. But simply understanding how to use technology will not provide the integration needed to reach the desired learning outcomes.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Last sentence here most important.
  • There is a need for integrating technology that is in the service of learning throughout the curriculum. More intentional use of technology to capture what students know and are able to integrate in their learning is needed.
Barbara Lindsey

Education Week: Information Overloaded - 0 views

  • If we’re going to insist that students bring home the information booty on Bradford by extracting the main ideas from his journal instead of simply admiring the book’s aesthetic values of form, rhythm, and content, then we need not bother with him, really. For proficiency’s sake—and ever since the information-overload bomb dropped, it’s all about proficiency (read: testing)—we can amass far more data in less time with a secondary text, whether a CliffsNotes or wordage from an American history scholar.
  • Clearly, living under this full-court press of information overload forces a few key questions for students and adults alike. What do we need to know? Why do we need to know it? And, given the fact that by the end of our lives we will only have absorbed and converted to knowledge a sliver of the information available to us in this new database-and-blog universe (the Web-page world, after all, is expanding and contracting at the rate of 1.5 million pages a day), should we bother knowing it?
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Halo effect of Internet information access? Does it exist really? How do we determine what students read and analyze. Has the Internet changed that at all?
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  • “We are no longer reading,” she writes, “we’re searching.”
  • What will run at a premium is the ability to inspire students to turn up gems of original knowledge in the digital-information mine, thoughts and ideas that advance thinking rather than regurgitate data.
  • The pursuit of knowledge is less a process of acquisition than one of hurling irrelevant material out the window.
Barbara Lindsey

EC&I 831 - 1 views

  • The goals of this course follow. Participants will: better understand the historical role technology and media have played in educational & social change; become knowledgeable of social learning tools & FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) as tools for teaching, facilitating learning, & designing educational environments; become familiar with the wealth of open educational resources (OERs), learning-related content, & media available for teaching & learning; become knowledgeable of relevant social learning theories and philosophies that respond to learning in the digital age; better understand the many social, educational, political, cultural, and administrative issues often associated with technology & media in education and society; become critical consumers and producers of digital media and information; and, build sustainable, personal learning environments and networks.
  • A significant portion of the course learning will happen outside of the scheduled, synchronous sessions. Participants will gain experience in social learning processes such as: writing reflective blog posts, commenting on participant blogs, reading and commenting on educational blogs from outside of the course, microblogging, reading and exploring other educational technology and learning-focused media, exploring social learning tools, and creating educational media.
  •  
    Couros Course on Social Media & Open Education "Open, Connected, Social" this course is open to credit and not-for-credit' students and features synchronous discussions via Elluminate and asynchronous work via microblogging, blogging, and the creation of digital content.
Barbara Lindsey

Educational Trends « Beyond WebCT: Integrating Social Networking Tools Into L... - 0 views

  • can one annotate on electronic books
  • “We must rethink ourselves.”
  • there is still a certain hierarchy that needs to be in place or else personal interest will become conflated with the interests of grading (we are still vested with a certain institutional authority, whether or not this is a pedagogical approach)
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  • I share your worry about technology becoming a roadblock instead of an open door in teaching.
  • Hopefully, as these approaches become more common and institutionalized, it there will be more opportunities to receive support from colleagues and other educators in their implementation.
  • Online materials are not necessarily peer reviewed, and those which are protected by copyright end up with inflated prices. I am not sure what the answer to this problem might be, but it is something that I would like to examine further in class.
  • Both the teacher AND the students become the LEARNERS.
  • The learners will label, name and design… 2. The learners will paraphrase, explain and illustrate… 3. The learners will demonstrate, prepare and solve… 4. The learners will differentiate, analyze and infer… 5. The learners will devise, revise and integrate… 6. The learners will evaluate, critique and compare…
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Bloom's taxonomy
  • both assume a business model of competition and profit. Education needs to maintain its sovereignty from what is really a form of hegemony.
  • But that the existence of such technology necessitates a total rethinking of the whole process seems like a power grab by a pervasive form of administration that stems from the business world. It is ridiculous that to be able simply to sit with a book in one’s lap and not be compelled to maintain permanent connectivity has become an act of resistance.
  • And I didn’t really want to hear the opinions of the other students who didn’t know anything more than I did. Or rather, it was nice to have discussions about the professor’s lecture, but without the lecture, there wouldn’t have been anything to discuss. We would have a book club, not a class.
  • By de-emphasizing content and knowledge, we’re turning students into middlemen who will know how to use technology to present a given subject matter, but who will be free to forget it as soon as the next task arrives on their desk.
Barbara Lindsey

We're on information overload / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

  • The pursuit of knowledge in the age of information overload is less about a process of acquisition than about proficiency in tossing stuff out.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      So is this similar to Shirky's statement that we suffer from filter failure rather than information overload?
Barbara Lindsey

2010 Horizon Report » The Horizon Project - 0 views

  • ongoing series of conversations and dialogs with hundreds of technology professionals, campus technologists, faculty leaders from colleges and universities, and representatives of leading corporations from more than two dozen countries. In each of the past six years, these conversations have resulted in the publication each January of a report focused on emerging technologies relevant to higher education.
  • When the cycle starts, little is known, or even can be known, about the appropriateness or efficacy of many of the emerging technologies for these purposes, as the Horizon Project expressly focuses on technologies not currently in widespread use in academe. In a typical year, 75 or more of these technologies may be identified for further investigation; for the 2010 report, more than 110 were considered
  • By engaging a wide community of interested parties, and diligently searching the Internet and other sources, enough information is gathered early in the process to allow the members of the Advisory Board to form an understanding of how each of the discovered technologies might be in use in settings outside of academe, to develop a sense of the potential the technology may have for higher education settings, and to envision applications of the technology for teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. The findings are discussed in a variety of settings — with faculty, industry experts, campus technologists, and of course, the Horizon Advisory Board. Of particular interest to the Advisory Board every year is finding educational applications for these technologies that may not be intuitive or obvious.
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  • ncreasingly the Horizon Project is a global effort. Each year at least a third of the members of the advisory board represent countries outside of North America.
  • Each Horizon Report is produced over a period of just a few months so that the information is timely and relevant.
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